Thanksgiving, the Canadian version of Thanksgiving, is quite different from the American celebration, which is based on a supposed feast shared between settlers and Indigenous peoples.
In Quebec (and Canada), the holiday has religious, Indigenous, and pagan origins. It is a time to give thanks for the abundance of the late-summer harvests.
Since every festival of abundance needs its feast, and since Quebec is a region of agriculture and livestock farming, we’re in a great position here in Montreal to prepare a Thanksgiving dinner using local ingredients and traditional family recipes.
The first official annual Thanksgiving celebration in Quebec took place on November 6, 1879. The original date reflected the arrival of fall in Europe and was later moved to the second Monday in October to align more closely with Indigenous celebrations marking the beginning of the season in Canada.
In 1957, Parliament designated the date as “the day on which we give thanks to Almighty God for the bountiful harvests with which He blesses Canada.”
LET’S HOST A THANKSGIVING DINNER WITH FRIENDS
The heart of Thanksgiving is always a meal where we gather all the people we love, and where we blissfully drift in a sense of community and a hyperglycemic coma.
Dinner is at parents’, aunts’, or grandparents’ homes in the countryside—but for those who are far from home or who have chosen a family of their own, organizing it is just as important, if not more so.
This year, we’re going to be the ones hosting the Thanksgiving dinner.
- long, colorful candles bought atANNEX Vintage
- a homemade roast turkey
- mismatched glassespicked up at a thrift store at the Marché Floh’s new home decor shop
- paper ribbons and garlands made with tissue paperfrom Boucle et Papier
It’s the time of year when creative types (and kids who, for once, are given a small, very sharp knife) get toshow offa little, andwhen we share stories about the origins and Celtic and other legendsof Halloween.
The spiral iron staircases are decorated with carved pumpkins sporting smiles that range from charming to slightly creepy. We eat pumpkin pie, makegnocchi,lattes, andhats for the cats.
Picking and buying pumpkins is also a ritual, anda road trip through the red and gold countryside of a Quebec autumnis one of the best days of the season—and the Thanksgiving weekend is the perfect time to go.
WE’RE GOING TO LISTEN TO STEVIE WONDER IN THE DARK
We have a great deal of gratitude for Thanksgiving, and an even more poetic sense of gratitude for the 50th anniversary of Stevie Wonder’s album *Songs in the Key of Life*.
And to make the experience even more transcendent, the listening takes place in complete darkness. It’s also for those who’ll be having a very noisy and somewhat chaotic dinner the next day—a chance for calm, gratitude, and music.
LET’S GO FOR A WALK IN THE FOREST
Thanksgiving weekend is one of the best times in the fall to go for a walk among the fall colors.
The region is vast, and the colors of the leaves—ranging from yellow to red, from golden to nearly black brown—change depending on the weather, the rain, the wind, and the ground cooling at night. To see the most beautiful colors of Montreal’s fall at just the right time, BONJOUR QUEBEC has an interactive online map where you can find the colors at their peak in the region.
LET’S GO SEE A SURREALISTIC HORROR CLASSIC AT THE MOVIES
The audience’s choice—always curated by the programming team at the independent cinema chain CINÉMA CINÉMA—is thecoolest “nerdy” moviepick we know.
For those in the mood for some surrealism this Thanksgiving, let’s watch the wild HOUSE (1977).
Each film will be shown three times—Friday night at 9:30 p.m., Saturday night at 9:30 p.m., and Sunday at 2:30 p.m.
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HOUSE (1977)
Nobuhiko Obayashi
Japanese original version with English subtitles
October 9–10–11
